DUANESBURG — As lawyers argued over votes and the margin of her state Senate bid against George Amedore grew and shrunk like a balloon, Cecilia Tkaczyk tended her sheep.

The 15 black-and-white Jacobs get shorn in March, but Tkaczyk was spinning thread from last year's wool harvest for a knitting show in New York City. She was also juggling the needs of her 13-year-old son, the demands of the holiday season and a period of "limbo" that lasted more than two months after Election Day.

"It's hard to move forward when you don't know the results," Tkaczyk told the Times Union during a Monday afternoon visit to her eight-acre farm on Barton Hill Road.

"Right around the holidays and my birthday, they declared (Amedore) the winner. I was getting emails saying, 'Sorry you didn't win,'" she said. "I kept saying, 'No! It's not over! There are more votes to count — we're not accepting this.'"

An appeals court ordered election officials to open 99 more ballots in the race, and when the votes were tallied last week Tkaczyk squeaked ahead by 18 votes. She expects to be sworn into office on Wednesday.

While she has served on the local school board for many years, Tkaczyk seems shy when set against senators who measure their time in elective office not in years. but decades. She speaks deliberately, almost nervously, and paused for a dozen seconds before deflecting a question about whether she was comfortable with the state's newly broadened definition of an assault weapon.

"I want to hear more about it and hear how constituents who have these guns feel about it," she said. "I don't have a gun, and I would just like to give folks an opportunity to tell me what they think before I decide how comfortable I am with it. I think there's opportunities to continue to work on the legislation because there's going to be some chapter amendments."

Tkaczyk's spokesman, Gary Ginsburg, told the Times Union on Jan. 15 — the day after the state Senate approved the bill expanding the assault weapons definition, requiring tens of thousands of current gun owners to register their arms — that she would have voted for the bill, which also increased criminal penalties for illegal weapons possession and allowed pistol owners to withhold permit application information from public disclosure.

Tkaczyk represents the new 46th District, which runs from Amsterdam to Kingston and includes parts of Montgomery, Schenectady, Albany, Greene and Ulster counties. It contains slightly more enrolled Democrats than Republicans, but a large portion of it is rural in character. Tkaczyk's effort was aided by having President Barack Obama at the top of the ticket, and she's likely to face a tough re-election effort in 2014.

For now, Tkaczyk will join the Senate's Democratic conference. Although she is the 33rd Democrat elected to the 63-seat chamber, the conference was relegated to the back seat after Republicans and the five-member Independent Democratic Conference formed the Majority Coalition, which negotiated the provisions of the gun bill with Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

Every Democrat in the Senate voted for the bill, which had many provisions contained in other measures sponsored by the conference's members. The open question in the unfolding legislative session is whether and in what form Republicans might allow other progressive bills — codifying abortion rights, overhauling the campaign finance system, raising the minimum wage or extending college tuition assistance to undocumented immigrants — to come to the floor.

A related question, of course, is whether Democrats like Tkaczyk will settle for measures they might consider half a loaf, or push for more.

Tkaczyk largely parried questions about this tension by saying it would depend on what bill was on the table, but said she'd stand firm on the abortion protections, and a campaign finance bill that includes partial taxpayer financing.

"I don't want to vote on a watered-down version," she said.

Tkaczyk said she'll be at the Capitol on Tuesday morning to set up her new office — in standard freshman quarters on the third floor of the Legislative Office Building — and hear Cuomo outline this year's state budget. She's still working on hiring aides, but she has an official phone number: 518- 455-2470.